With a total population of about 20 million, the DPRK is a highly regimented society that lives and dies by a "military first" policy. Its standing army is 1.1 million strong with reserve forces of six million. The merciless razing of the north’s cities by American bombers during the Korean War left deep scars on the local psyche. At one point in A State of Mind, gymnast Pak visits the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum and asks her grandfather whether a shot-down US aircraft on display once dropped bombs on Pyongyang. He replies, "No, but it dropped all kinds of insects containing the virus of various plagues."

Review: Kimjongilia There is very little new in N.C. Heikin's documentary attack on North Korea's endless dictatorship that hasn't been seen or heard before.

The death of the American city, revisited Urban renewal is seldom discussed as anything but the great scourge of the American city — a disastrous post-World War II push to steamroll working-class neighborhoods and replace them with towering concrete buildings and cavernous plazas that sterilized once-vibrant places.

Review: Kimjongilia There is very little new in N.C. Heikin's documentary attack on North Korea's endless dictatorship that hasn't been seen or heard before.

The death of the American city, revisited Urban renewal is seldom discussed as anything but the great scourge of the American city — a disastrous post-World War II push to steamroll working-class neighborhoods and replace them with towering concrete buildings and cavernous plazas that sterilized once-vibrant places.

I was a teenage Sandinista As a freshman philosophy major at the University of Colorado, Deb Olin Unferth fell in love with a junior named George. A pious Evangelical, George felt it was his duty to help his Communist brethren in Central America fight against their capitalist oppressors. So he did, and Unferth went with him.

John Birch Society alive and confused in Maine The Maine arm of the John Birch Society, founded in 1958 to combat communist influence in government, visited the State House in Augusta last week, calling for legislators to, well, do nothing, as it turns out.

What's behind the curtain? Here's our third Gubernatorial Scorecard, in which we score Governor Paul LePage on political savvy, and on whether what he's trying to do is good policy. Note the running total.

This trickle-down stinks True free-market capitalism has lasted 30 years — barely half as long as its arch-enemy, Soviet communism.

Review: My Perestroika Socialism might be a dirty word in America, but for Russians during the Soviet era, it was the way things were.